Each mailbox has its own separate index files. If the index files are disabled, the same structures are still kept in the memory, except cache file is disabled completely (because the client probably won't fetch same data twice).

If index files are missing, Dovecot creates them automatically when the mailbox is opened. If at any point creating a file or growing a file gives "not enough disk space" error, the indexes are transparently moved to memory for the rest of the session.

See IndexFiles for more generic information about what they contain and why.

See IndexFiles for more generic information about what they contain and why.

The index files can be accessed using [:Design/Indexes/MailIndexApi:mail-index.h API].

Locking

The index files are designed so that readers cannot block a writer, and write locks are always short enough not to cause other processes to wait too long. Dovecot v0.99's index files didn't do this, and it was common to get lock timeouts when using multiple connections to the same large mailbox.

The main index file is the only file which has read locks. They can however block the writer only for two seconds (and even this could be changed to not block at all). The writes are locked only for the duration of the mailbox synchronization.

Transaction logs don't require read locks. The writing is locked for the duration of the mailbox synchronization, and also for single transaction appends.

Cache files doesn't require read locks. They're locked for writing only for the duration of allocating space inside the file. The actual writing inside the allocated space is done without any locks being held.

In future these could be improved even further. For example there's no need to keep any index files locked while synchronizing, as long the mailbox backend takes care of the locking issues. Also writing to transaction log could work in a similar way to cache files: Lock, allocate space, unlock, write.

Lockless integers

Dovecot uses several different techniques to allow reading files without locking them. One of them uses fields in a "lockless integer" format. Initially these fields have "unset" value. They can be set to a wanted value in range 0..228 (with 32bit fields) once, but they cannot be changed. It would be possible to set them back to "unset", but setting them the second time isn't safe anymore, so Dovecot never does this.

The lockless integers work by allocating one bit from each byte of the value to "this value is set" flag. The reader then verifies that the flag is set for the value's all bytes. If all of them aren't set, the value is still "unset". Dovecot uses the highest bit for this flag. So for example:

0x00000000: The value is unset

0xFFFF7FFF: The value is unset, because one of the bytes didn't have the highest bit set

0xFFFFFFFF: The value is 228-1

0x80808080: The value is 0

0x80808180: The value is 0x80

Dovecot contains mail_index_uint32_to_offset() and mail_index_offset_to_uint32() functions to translate values between integers and lockless integers. The "unset" value is returned as 0, so it's not possible to differentiate between "unset" and "set" 0 values.